§ 2
It is only in the last few weeks, the young man wrote, that we have heard of all these schemes to break up the tradition of Woldingstanton, and now there is a talk of your resigning the headmastership in favour of Mr. Farr. Personally, Sir, I can’t imagine how you can possibly dream of giving up your work—and to him of all people;—I still have a sort of doubt about it; but my uncle was very positive that you were disposed to resign (personally, he said, he had implored you to stay), and it is on the off-chance of his being right that I am bothering you with this letter. Briefly it is to implore you to stand by the school, which is as much as to say to stand by yourself and us. You’ve taught hundreds of us to stick it, and now you owe it to us to stick it yourself. I know you’re ill, dreadfully ill; I’ve heard about Gilbert, and I know, Sir, we all know, although he wasn’t in the school and you never betrayed a preference or were led into an unfair thing through it, how much you loved him; you’ve been put through it, Sir, to the last degree. But, Sir, there are some of us here who feel almost as though they were your sons; if you don’t and can’t give us that sort of love, it doesn’t alter the fact that there are men out here who think of you as they’d like to think of their fathers. Men like myself particularly, who were left as boys without a father.
I’m no great hand at expressing myself; I’m no credit to Mr. Cross and his English class; generally I don’t believe in saying too much; but I would like to tell you something of what you have been to a lot of us, and why Woldingstanton going on will seem to us like a flag still flying and Woldingstanton breaking its tradition like a sort of surrender. And I don’t want a bit to flatter you, Sir, if you’ll forgive me, and set you up in what I am writing to you. One of the loveable things about you to us is that you have always been so jolly human to us. You’ve always been unequal. I’ve seen you give lessons that were among the best lessons in the world, and I’ve seen you give some jolly bad lessons. And there were some affairs—that business of the November fireworks for example—when we thought you were harsh and wrong—
“I was wrong,” said Mr. Huss.
That almost led to a mutiny. But that is just where you score, and why Woldingstanton can’t do without you. When that firework row was on we called a meeting of the school and house prefects and had up some of the louts to it—you never heard of that meeting—and we said, we all agreed you were wrong and we all agreed that right or wrong we stood by you, and wouldn’t let the row go further. Perhaps you remember how that affair shut up all at once. But that is where you’ve got us. You do wrong, you let us see through you; there never was a schoolmaster or a father gave himself away so freely as you do, you never put up a sham front on us and consequently every one of us knows that what he knows about you is the real thing in you; the very kids in the lower fifth can get a glimpse of it and grasp that you are driving at something with all your heart and soul, and that the school goes somewhere and has life in it. We Woldingstanton boys have that in common when we meet; we understand one another; we have something that a lot of the other chaps one meets out here, even from the crack schools, don’t seem to have. It isn’t a flourish with us, Sir, it is a simple statement of fact that the life we joined up to at Woldingstanton is more important to us than the life in our bodies. Just as it is more important to you. It isn’t only the way you taught it, though you taught it splendidly, it is the way you felt it that got hold of us. You made us think and feel that the past of the world was our own history; you made us feel that we were in one living story with the reindeer men and the Egyptian priests, with the soldiers of Cæsar and the alchemists of Spain; nothing was dead and nothing alien; you made discovery and civilization our adventure and the whole future our inheritance. Most of the men I meet here feel lost in this war; they are like rabbits washed out of their burrows by a flood, but we of Woldingstanton have taken it in the day’s work, and when the peace comes and the new world begins, it will still be in the story for us, the day’s work will still join on. That’s the essence of Woldingstanton, that it puts you on the high road that goes on. The other chaps I talk to here from other schools seem to be on no road at all. They are tough and plucky by nature and association; they are fighters and sturdy men; but what holds them in it is either just habit and the example of people about them or something unsound that can’t hold out to the end; a vague loyalty to the Empire or a desire to punish the Hun or restore the peace of Europe, some short range view of that sort, motives that will leave them stranded at the end of the war, anyhow, with nothing to go on to. To talk of after the war to them is to realize what blind alleys their teachers have led them into. They can understand fighting against things but not for things. Beyond an impossible ambition to go back somewhere and settle down as they used to be, there’s not the ghost of an idea to them at all. The whole value of Woldingstanton is that it steers a man through and among the blind alleys and sets him on a way out that he can follow for all the rest of his days; it makes him a player in a limitless team and one with the Creator. We are all coming back to take up our jobs in that spirit, jobs that will all join up at last in making a real world state, a world civilization and a new order of things, and unless we can think of you, sir, away at Woldingstanton, working away to make more of us, ready to pick up the sons we shall send you presently—
Mr. Huss stopped reading.